Tuesday, August 15, 2006

Anyone switched to the new Blogger Beta yet? Can't decide if I'll do it now or wait till it's settled in a bit.

Looks fancy though. It's going to have category archives, RSS feeds for comments and an end to the infamous "Publishing" spinner. Apparently all of my main gripes with blogger are about to become history. Which would be nice.

Update

Here's one I made earlier. You can't directly edit the HTML yet but it is coming. Can't find an RSS feed for all comments but it does have one for each post. It ll looks rather promising.

Update 2

Can't resist. It's like a new thing and stuff. Things might look a bit odd for a while while I get to grips with it. See you on the other side. I hope.

Update 3

Bah!

Could not switch you to the new Blogger

Thanks for your interest in the new Blogger in beta! For now, we are only switching a limited number of users to this new version. We can't switch your account at this time, but hope to be able to do so soon. Please check back through your dashboard for when you'll be able to try switching again.

And bah again.

The only reason I'd even heard about it was because there's a whole new Blogger login doodah which specifically asks if you want to switch. Not impressed.

13 comments:

Is there a facility to generate a link-list to the most recent comments? It was that single omission, more than anything else, that finally drove me away from blogger and into the open arms of WordPress (which is the best move a blogger can make in my view)

Not sure yet. At the moment, I can't get it to produce the feed for all comments, just seperate feeds for individual posts. They do specifically say it can be done though so I suspect that's just a glitch. And there is an option to publish content from feeds in the sidebar so I suspect it'll be possible.

Been thinking about swapping to Wordpress for a while. This new blogger update'll probably allow me to continue to procrastinate on that.

Hmmm... Topic archives, eh? That was my main gripe - and my main reason for pondering the Wordpress move. They introduce that - and, preferably, a more flexible template editing system - and I may well stick around.

I'll still have to go through upwards of 2,000 posts assigning "labels", though...

I only just heard about it today. Like you I'm tempted but I'd like to know more. Basically I'm terrified of buggering up the whole blog. I like the idea of more easy template editing and a comment list. Hmm, I think I'll go and have another look.

Davide, I've decided I am going to go for it. The lure of the shiny new thing is strong indeed. Ditto on the worry that it'll bugger everything up but if they're encouraging people to switch, I'm going to assume they're reasonably confident that it won't all go horribly wrong. Hopefully.

I hadn't heard about this 'til I saw your post. It sounds like a good idea - no doubt there will be teething problems until it is rolled-out properly, which is why they call it a beta version, I suppose.

The facility to have category archives will be a big advance. I already switched about a year ago to having individual permalinks for each post - that helped a lot when I wanted to reference an earlier post; it took a while and quite a lot of HTML tweaking of my template to get it to work correctly. I also have a link-list for my 10 most recent posts - there is a guide on how to do it in 'How to' part of the help area.

I've often thought about moving the hosting of my blog onto a sub-area of my main website, but find it convenient to leave it the way it is for now. As for the Wordpress option, I've thought about that, too, but from what I see not everyone who has gone this route has managed to make the formatting look consistent across different browsers - I take a good deal of trouble to ensure that my blog works in the most popular browsers and that the formatting adjusts automatically for different page formats. I've been with Blogger since way before it became a small cog in the Google empire and a lot of the griping about problems with it seem to me to be down to the users themselves, although like all hosting systems (including the two other hosts with whom I host various other websites) they are subject to occasional down-time and I have only once been driven to move a website to another host for practical operational reasons.

Which pretty much makes my decision for me, I'm using Blogger as a CMS on a different site already, and will be moving NLE to my own domain soon as well, now I can give up on thinking about Wordpress I think. If shiny thing isn't crap.

Well I gave it a go but seeing as you can't switch over yet it seems a bit pointless. It is a bit better than the original Blogger, so I suppose I'll just have to wait until we can switch over. I was hoping for a better selection of templates.

I just made the switch to the new blogger account. I saw the option to switch in the dashboard and in a moment of bravery just sort of clicked on it. So The Nether-World has moved. I don't know how it will affect people trying to access it using the usual URL (the address is the same except that index.html is now added after).

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I've moved here.
BSSC is written by a Scotsman called Garry Smith. He has no affiliations or connections to any political party or media organisation. His views are his own.
Garry has only written about himself in the third person twice and you're reading the second effort now. The first was the previous version of this profile which referred to his former pseudonym, CuriousHamster. This odd nickname has now been retired.
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